Lots of great things on the @impactwales twitter account, often in nice ‘sketch’ format. Here are some ways to have your pupils work on retrieval practice.

I’ve been reading a few things about inferential comprehension. Many of the articles I’ve read lead to similar conclusion, it’s a knowledge thing, rather than a practice/skill thing. This article sums up many of the ideas.

Feedback is one of the most cost effective ways to ensure pupil progress. There are lots of ways to do this, and there are some articles which suggest marking of books is the least time effective way of delivering feedback. There is an article from TES about effective feedback here and there are ideas for providing feedback here.

A really interesting article about school’s use of social media and parental engagement which may be connected to it. Our school has improved it’s use of twitter over the past 12 months and all staff are engaged with it. I think our children could have more of a ‘say’ in it’s use and maybe that is something that our Community Council could discuss.

Our parents have engaged with it. The numbers, likes, replies etc are there for all to see, and it’s grown over the year. I’m no entirely sure what Local Authorities/Government agencies/Governments are after when they use the term ‘Parental engagement’.

Is it that we’d like parents to ‘support’ their child by making sure they do any homework we set each night (and maybe not letting their child go to dance, football, scouts etc)?

Is it that we’d like parents to raise money for the school (although I’m of the opinion that school should be funded well from our taxation systems, not from the hard work of volunteers)?

If parental engagement with school is so vital, what should our outside agencies do through a mixture of support and ‘punishment’ to ensure it happens? (Parents were fined at one point for taking a term time holiday- was that an effective punishment?)

If you have thoughts on this, drop in a comment…